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“Ours are the best trains, because they go nowhere,” observes a character in Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-nominated The Great Beauty, describing a frenetic conga line at a joyously decadent fete in contemporary Rome. But what to wear on this journey to the end of the night? Something slinky and the color of a dark semiprecious jewel, something one-shouldered—or maybe a thing with feathers, cut to reveal a bare midriff, toned not by sessions at the gym but rather through the ministrations of an Italian Dr. Quackenbush employing the latest techniques dubious science can provide?

In this dazzling dystopian vision of modern Italy, the earring and the pendant, in all their dangling, tangled glory, serve as indicators of the debauched wearers’ preoccupations—the longer the swinging chains, the wider the hoops, the more hedonistic the reveler.

And you don’t have to be young, or even particularly svelte to sport these provocative ensembles—the sweet, sad Ramona, who strips and dances for a living (“Too bad she doesn’t spend her money on drugs,” her mordant dad laments, “then we would have something in common”) is 42 years old. She shows up at a party in a sheer, skintight, flesh-colored jumpsuit, whose beads cover exactly nothing. Her wary gaze may be as gray and stony as the Colosseum, but among the desperate sybarites who surround her, she is a fallen angel. When the child star art-performer of the evening is trotted out wailing to fling buckets of paint at a wall, Ramona exclaims, horrified, that the girl is crying. “Nonsense, that girl earns millions!” comes the cold response. The beads quiver.